RAISING OF VALUES
"Destiny is not about thee, but within,--
Thyself must make thyself."
"The world is no longer clay, but rather iron in the hands of its
workers," says Emerson, "and men have got to hammer out a place for
themselves by steady and rugged blows."
To make the most of your "stuff," be it cloth, iron, or
character,--this is success. Raising common "stuff" to priceless value
is great success.
The man who first takes the rough bar of wrought iron may be a
blacksmith, who has only partly learned his trade, and has no ambition
to rise above his anvil. He thinks that the best possible thing he can
do with his bar is to make it into horseshoes, and congratulates
himself upon his success. He reasons that the rough lump of iron is
worth only two or three cents a pound, and that it is not worth while
to spend much time or labor on it. His enormous muscles and small
skill have raised the value of the iron from one dollar, perhaps, to
ten dollars.
Along comes a cutler, with a little better education, a little more
ambition, a little finer perception, and says to the blacksmith: "Is
this all you can see in that iron? Give me a bar, and I will show you
what brains and skill and hard work can make of it." He sees a little
further into the rough bar. He has studied many processes of hardening
and tempering; he has tools, grinding and polishing wheels, and
annealing furnaces. The iron is fused, carbonized into steel, drawn
out, forged, tempered, heated white-hot, plunged into cold water or oil
to improve its temper, and ground and polished with great care and
patience. When this work is done, he shows the astonished blacksmith
two thousand dollars' worth of knife-blades where the latter only saw
ten dollars' worth of crude horseshoes. The value has been greatly
raised by the refining process.
"Knife-blades are all very well, if you can make nothing better," says
another artisan, to whom the cutler has shown the triumph of his art,
"but you haven't half brought out what is in that bar of iron. I see a
higher and better use; I have made a study of iron, and know what there
is in it and what can be made of it."
This artisan has a more delicate touch, a finer perception, a better
training, a higher ideal, and superior determination, which enable him
to look still further into the molecules of the rough bar,--past the
horse-shoes, past the knife-blades,--and he turns the crude iron into
the finest cambric needles, with eyes cut with microscopic exactness.
The production of the invisible points requires a more delicate
process, a finer grade of skill than the cutler possesses.
This feat the last workman considers marvelous, and he thinks he has
exhausted the possibilities of the iron. He has multiplied many times
the value of the cutler's product.
But, behold! another very skilful mechanic, with a more finely
organized mind, a more delicate touch, more patience, more industry, a
higher order of skill, and a better training, passes with ease by the
horse-shoes, the knife-blades, and the needles, and returns the product
of his bar in fine mainsprings for watches. Where the others saw
horseshoes, knife-blades, or needles, worth only a few thousand
dollars, his penetrating eye saw a product worth one hundred thousand
dollars.
A higher artist-artisan appears, who tells us that the rough bar has
not even yet found its highest expression; that he possesses the magic
that can perform a still greater miracle in iron. To him, even
main-springs seem coarse and clumsy. He knows that the crude iron can
be manipulated and coaxed into an elasticity that can not even be
imagined by one less trained in metallurgy. He knows that, if care
enough be used in tempering the steel, it will not be stiff, trenchant,
and merely a passive metal, but so full of its new qualities that it
almost seems instinct with life.
With penetrating, almost clairvoyant vision, this artist-artisan sees
how every process of mainspring making can be carried further; and how,
at every stage of manufacture, more perfection can be reached; how the
texture of the metal can be so much refined that even a fiber, a
slender thread of it, can do marvelous work. He puts his bar through
many processes of refinement and fine tempering, and, in triumph, turns
his product into almost invisible coils of delicate hair-springs.
After infinite toil and pain, he has made his dream true; he has raised
the few dollars' worth of iron to a value of one million dollars,
perhaps forty times the value of the same weight of gold.
Still another workman, whose processes are so almost infinitely
delicate, whose product is so little known, by even the average
educated man, that his trade is unmentioned by the makers of
dictionaries and encylopedias, takes but a fragment of one of the bars
of steel, and develops its higher possibilities with such marvelous
accuracy, such ethereal fineness of touch, that even mainsprings and
hairsprings are looked back upon as coarse, crude, and cheap. When his
work is done, he shows you a few of the minutely barbed instruments
used by dentists to draw out the finest branches of the dental nerves.
While a pound of gold, roughly speaking, is worth about two hundred and
fifty dollars, a pound of these slender, barbed filaments of steel, if
a pound could be collected, might be worth hundreds of times as much.
Other experts may still further refine the product, but it will be many
a day before the best will exhaust the possibilities of a metal that
can be subdivided until its particles will float in the air.
It sounds magical, but the magic is only that wrought by the
application of the homeliest virtues; by the training of the eye, the
hand, the perception; by painstaking care, by hard work, and by
determination and grit.
If a metal possessing only a few coarse material qualities is capable
of such marvelous increase in value, by mixing brains with its
molecules, who shall set bounds to the possibilities of the development
of a human being, that wonderful compound of physical, mental, moral,
and spiritual forces? Whereas, in the development of iron, a dozen
processes are possible, a thousand influences may be brought to bear
upon mind and character. While the iron is an inert mass acted upon by
external influences only, the human being is a bundle of forces, acting
and counteracting, yet all capable of control and direction by the
higher self, the real, dominating personality.
The difference in human attainment is due only slightly to the original
material. It is the ideal followed and unfolded, the effort made, the
processes of education and experience undergone that fuse, hammer, and
mold our life-bar into its ultimate development.
Life, everyday life, has counterparts of all the tortures the iron
undergoes, and through them it comes to its highest expression. The
blows of opposition, the struggles amid want and woe, the fiery trials
of disaster and bereavement, the crushings of iron circumstances, the
raspings of care and anxiety, the grinding of constant difficulties,
the rebuffs that chill enthusiasm, the weariness of years of dry,
dreary drudgery in education and discipline,--all these are necessary
to the man who would reach the highest success.
The iron, by this manipulation, is strengthened, refined, made more
elastic or more resistant, and adapted to the use each artisan dreams
of. If every blow should fracture it, if every furnace should burn the
life out of it, if every roller should pulverize it, of what use would
it be? It has that virtue, those qualities that withstand all; that
draw profit from every test, and come out triumphant in the end. In
the iron the qualities are, in the main, inherent; but in ourselves
they are largely matters of growth, culture, and development, and all
are subject to the dominating will.
Just as each artisan sees in the crude iron some finished, refined
product, so must we see in our lives glorious possibilities, if we
would but realize them. If we see only horseshoes or knife-blades, all
our efforts and struggles will never produce hairsprings. We must
realize our own adaptability to great ends; we must resolve to
struggle, to endure trials and tests, to pay the necessary price,
confident that the result will pay us for our suffering, our trials,
and our efforts.
Those who shrink from the forging, the rolling, and the drawing out,
are the ones who fail, the "nobodies," the faulty characters, the
criminals. Just as a bar of iron, if exposed to the elements, will
oxidize, and become worthless, so will character deteriorate if there
is no constant effort to improve its form, to increase its ductility,
to temper it, or to better it in some way.
It is easy to remain a common bar of iron, or comparatively so, by
becoming merely a horseshoe; but it is hard to raise your life-product
to higher values.
Many of us consider our natural gift-bars poor, mean, and inadequate,
compared with those of others; but, if we are willing, by patience,
toil, study, and struggle, to hammer, draw out, and refine, to work on
and up from clumsy horseshoes to delicate hairsprings, we can, by
infinite patience and persistence, raise the value of the raw material
to almost fabulous heights. It was thus that Columbus, the weaver,
Franklin, the journeyman printer, Aesop, the slave, Homer, the beggar,
Demosthenes, the cutler's son, Ben Jonson, the bricklayer, Cervantes,
the common soldier, and Haydn, the poor wheelwright's son, developed
their powers, until they towered head and shoulders above other men.
There is very little difference between the material given to a hundred
average boys and girls at birth, yet one with no better means of
improvement than the others, perhaps with infinitely poorer means, will
raise his material in value a hundredfold, five-hundredfold, aye, a
thousandfold, while the ninety-nine will wonder why their material
remains so coarse and crude, and will attribute their failure to hard
luck.
While one boy is regretting his want of opportunities, his lack of
means to get a college education, and remains in ignorance, another
with half his chances picks up a good education in the odds and ends of
time which other boys throw away. From the same material, one man
builds a palace and another a hovel. From the same rough piece of
marble, one man calls out an angel of beauty which delights every
beholder, another a hideous monster which demoralizes every one who
sees it.
The extent to which you can raise the value of your life-bar depends
very largely upon yourself. Whether you go upward to the mainspring or
hairspring stage, depends very largely upon your ideal, your
determination to be the higher thing, upon your having the grit to be
hammered, to be drawn out, to be thrust from the fire into cold water
or oil in order to get the proper temper.
Of course, it is hard and painful, and it takes lots of stamina to
undergo the processes that produce the finest product, but would you
prefer to remain a rough bar of iron or a horseshoe all your life?
[Illustration: Lincoln studying by the firelight]